Sustainable
development is development that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Mark Swilling, BA, BA Hons, PhD

Professor, Sustainability Institute and School of Public Leadership, Stellenbosch University

Mark
Swilling is programme co-ordinator of the Sustainable Development
Programme in the School of Public Leadership, Stellenbosch University.
He is also project leader of the Centre for the Transdisciplinary Study
of Sustainability and Complexity, and Academic Director of the
Sustainability Institute. Current research is on global material flows
and sustainable cities, with special reference to urban infrastructure.

Correspondence to: Mark Swilling (Mark.Swilling@spl.sun.ac.za)

In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development published Our Common Future.1
This report attempted to reconcile the ecological ‘limits to
growth’, articulated by the northern green movement since the
early 1970s, with the need for growth to eliminate poverty, as
articulated by developing countries in the south, many of whom had
recently broken free from colonial control. The most frequently quoted
definition of sustainable development originated in this report:
‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of
the present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs.’ Although this is a definition that is
highly contested,2
this extremely influential report provided the strategic foundation for
the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, the World Summit on Sustainable
Development, which took place in Johannesburg in 2002, and numerous
international sectoral policy conferences between 1972 and 2002.5 These
global events put in place the fragile multilateral, global governance
system, which is all we have today to face our collective global
‘polycrisis’. Since the release of Our Common Future
we have learnt much about the challenges we face: numerous crises that
were predicted – but little done to avoid – are starting to
be noticed by mainstream centres across many nations in the developed
and developing world.6 This
has given rise to a new literature on sustainability/sustainable
development, and the emergence of a field formally designated as
‘sustainability science’.3,4,10 The first synthesis of a southern African perspective on sustainability science has also recently been published.16

The second Copernican revolution

Seven globally significant, mainstream documents will, in one
way or another, shape the way our generation sees the world which we
need to change. These are as follows:

• Ecosystem degradation. The United Nations (UN) Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,
compiled by 1 360 scientists from 95 countries and released in
2005 (with virtually no impact beyond the environmental sciences), has
confirmed for the first time that 60% of the ecosystems upon which
human systems depend for survival are degraded.7

• Global warming. The broadly
accepted reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
confirm that global warming is taking place due to release into the
atmosphere of greenhouse gases caused by, among other things, the
burning of fossil fuels, and that if average temperatures increase by
2˚C or more this is going to lead to major ecological and
socio-economic changes, most of them for the worse, and the
world’s poor will experience the most destructive consequences.17

• Oil peak. The 2008 World Energy Outlook, published by the International Energy Agency, declared the ‘end of cheap oil’.18
Although there is still some dispute over whether we have hit peak oil
production or not, the fact remains that mainstream perspectives now
broadly agree with the once vilified ‘peak oil’ perspective
(see www.peakoil.net). Even the major oil companies now agree that oil
prices are going to rise and alternatives to oil must be found sooner
rather than later. Oil accounts for over 60% of the global
economy’s energy needs. Our cities and global economy depend on
cheap oil and changing this means a fundamental rethink of the
assumptions underpinning nearly a century of urban planning dogma.

• Inequality. According to the UN Human Development Report for
1998, 20% of the global population who live in the richest countries
account for 86% of total private consumption expenditure, whereas the
poorest 20% account for 1.3%.19
Only the most callous still ignore the significance of inequality as a
driver of many threats to social cohesion and a decent quality of life
for all.

• Urban majority. According to
generally accepted UN reports, the majority (i.e. just over 50%) of the
world’s population was living in urban areas by 2007.6 According to the UN habitat report entitled The Challenge of Slums,
one billion of the six billion people who live on the planet live in
slums or, put differently, one-third of the world’s total urban
population (rising to over 75% in the least developed countries) live
in slums or what we refer to in South Africa as informal settlements.20

• Food insecurity. The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development21
is the most thorough global assessment of the state of agricultural
science and practice that has ever been conducted. According to this
report, modern industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture has caused
significant ecological degradation which, in turn, will threaten food
security in a world in which access to food is already highly unequal
and demand is fast outstripping supply. Significantly, this report
confirmed that ‘23% of all used land is degraded to some
degree’.21

• Material flows. According to a 2011
report by the International Resource Panel
(http://www.unep.org/resourcepanel), by 2005 the global economy
depended on 60 billion tonnes of primary resources (biomass, fossil
fuels, metals and industrial and construction minerals) and 500
exajoules of energy, an increase of 36% since 1980.22

The above trends combine to conjure up a picture of a highly
unequal urbanised world, dependent on rapidly degrading ecosystem
services, with looming threats triggered by climate change, high oil
prices, food insecurities and resource depletion. This is what the
mainstream literature on unsustainable development is worried about.
This marks what is now increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene – the era in which humans have become the primary force of historico-geophysical evolution.23

Significantly, although these seven docu-
ments are in the policy domain they reflect the outcomes of many years
of much deeper research on global change by scientists and researchers
working across disciplines and diverse contexts on all continents.
Although this process of scientific inquiry leading to policy change is
most dramatic with respect to climate science,24 it is also true for the life sciences that fed into the outcomes expressed in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,
the resource economics that has slowly established the significance of
rising oil prices and, most recently, of all the rise of material flow
analysis (more on these later). The rise of our ability to ‘see
the planet’ has given rise to what Clark et al. have appropriately called the ‘second Copernican revolution’.25 The first, of course, goes back to the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
by Copernicus in 1530, but only ‘proven’ a century later by
Galileo, who established by observation that Copernicus was correct
when he claimed that the sun rather than Earth was the centre of the
universe. This brilliant act of defining the planetary system through
observation was a – perhaps the – defining moment that paved the way for the Enlightenment and the industrial epoch that followed.

Clark et al. date
the second Copernican revolution to the meeting in 2001 when delegates
from over 100 countries signed the Amsterdam Declaration which
established the ‘Earth-System Science Partnership’.25 The logical outcome of this profound paradigm shift is an increasingly sophisticated appreciation of what Rockstrom et al. have called our ‘planetary boundaries’ which define the ‘safe operating space for humanity’.26 The
significance of the Rockstrom article is that it managed to integrate,
for the first time, the quantifications of these ‘planetary
boundaries’ that had already been established by various
mono-disciplines. These included some key markers, such as not
exceeding 350 parts per million of CO2
in the atmosphere; extracting 35 million tonnes of nitrogen from the
atmosphere per year; an extinction rate of 10; global freshwater use of
4 000 km3 per year, and a fixed percentage of global land cover converted to cropland.26 Without
the ‘second Copernican revolution’ a new science
appropriate for a more sustainable world and the associated ethics
would be unviable.

Global warming

The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) published in 2007 confirmed the general trends of
the previous assessment reports, namely that global temperatures are
rising, and that these temperature increases are due to an increase in
concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere caused by human
activities.17
The International Energy Agency forecasts that if policies remain
unchanged, world energy demand is set to increase by 45% by 2030.18 At the same time, since 1988 the IPCC has warned that nations need to stabilise their concentrations of CO2
equivalent emissions, requiring significant reductions in the order of
60% or more by 2050. In the latest report the IPCC argues that
dangerous climate change global emissions need to start declining by
2012 - 2013, and that by 2020 global cuts of 25 - 40% are needed. By
2050 cuts of at least 80% are necessary. The main human activities that
have resulted in a 70% increase in greenhouse gas emissions since 1970
are the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and agricultural
production. The projections for the future suggest that even if we act
now to build low-carbon economies, temperatures will still rise by 2˚C.
If we make moderate changes along the lines envisaged by the Kyoto
Protocol, we could face runaway global warming with devastating
consequences. Either way, it may be worth quoting a conservative source
on the impact on the poor, namely Sir Nicholas Stern, who wrote in his
report to the UK government:27

‘All countries will be affected. The
most vulnerable – the poorest countries and populations –
will suffer earliest and most, even though they have contributed least
to the causes of climate change.’

The latest IPCC report suggests that the African continent, which
has contributed least to global warming, will be drastically affected
by climate change. The main findings are that between 75 and 250
million people will suffer the consequences of increased water stress
by 2020; by the same date productive outputs from rain-fed agriculture
could drop by 50%, with obvious negative consequences for food
security; by the end of the twentieth century sea level rise will have
negatively affected most of the low-lying coastal cities around the
coast of Africa; and by 2080 arid and semi-arid land areas will have
increased by between 5% and 8%. There is little evidence that
researchers and decision-makers in Africa have registered the full
implications of the multiple impacts of global warming for the way in
which development policies are designed in Africa.

Sustainability, inequality and the limits of ecological modernisation

After all is said and done, the challenge of sustainable development
in the current global conjuncture is about eradicating poverty, and
doing this in a way that rebuilds the ecosystems and natural resources
on which we depend for our collective survival.

It has been argued elsewhere that poverty eradication through
a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources can only
be achieved if ways are found to restructure the global economy.28 To do this, we will need to consider ways of achieving what Gallopin has called ‘non-material economic growth’.29
Whereas economic growth is traditionally associated with an increase in
the size of material stocks (buildings, infrastructures) and the per
capita consumption of material goods, this can be changed by
introducing indicators of progress (such as, for example, a Happiness
Index) that values well-being over personal wealth accumulation
including, for example, improvements in public health, restored natural
environment, greater choice of cultural activities, less inequality and
more personal security. Non-material growth is about improvements in
well-being without a growth in material infrastructures and goods.
Gallopin makes useful distinctions between development (improvements in well-being plus material economic growth), maldevelopment (material economic growth with no improvements in well-being), underdevelopment (no material economic growth and no improvements in well-being), and sustainable development (improvements
in well-being plus non-material economic growth). The challenge for
many developing countries may well be conventional development for now
to create the material basis for a transition later on to sustainable
development. Developed countries can make that transition now. Gallopin
argues as follows: 29

‘In the very long term, there are two
basic types of truly sustainable development situations: increasing
quality of life with non-material growth (but no net material growth)
and zero-growth economies (no economic growth at all). Sustainable
development need not imply the cessation of economic growth: a
zero-growth material economy with a positively growing non-material
economy is the logical implication of sustainable development. While
demographic growth and material economic growth must eventually
stabilize, cultural, psychological, and spiritual growth is not
constrained by physical limits.’

For many in the developed world,
the sustainability crisis is synonymous with global warming. However,
an exclusive focus on global warming runs the danger of reinforcing the
notion that global warming is just a hitch along the path of progress
that will be resolved by some kind of grand techno-fix (legitimised by
a narrow conception of ‘mitigation’). Global warming is, in
reality, not just an unfortunate side-effect of the global industrial
system, it is an intrinsic part of how this system is constituted,
fuelled and financed. As argued by Sachs et al.
in their influential paper published in the lead-up to the World Summit
on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, unless we are
prepared to deal with the root causes in the way our economic system is
configured, solutions to global warming and ecosystem breakdown will
elude us.30
This means recognising that the most powerful corporations in the world
profit from value chains that contribute directly to the worst aspects
of global warming: mass private transit, oil production, cement-based
building construction, energy production and distribution, large-scale
commercial agriculture and deforestation. Very few of the mainstream
global reports blame the core structure of this capitalist economic
system and the over-riding logic of capital accumulation for the mess
we are in and the implications for billions of people who will suffer
the consequences.

The 2008 - 2011 financial crisis might
raise some awareness about the linkages, but it is too early to tell.
It is time, however, for the world’s corporate elites to account
for the products they produce, and the impacts of the sources of raw
materials and processes of transforming these materials into final
products.

Conclusion

In light of the massive expansion of our scientific knowledge about
our natural resources and ecosystems, it may be necessary in future to
accept what the Brundtland Report rejected, namely that there are
indeed ‘absolute limits’ that should not be breached. This
would mean endorsing, for example, the IPCC recommendation that average
CO2 emissions
per capita should be 2.2 tonnes rather than the current 4.5 tonnes; or
the suggestion by the International Panel for Sustainable Resource
Management that the average consumption of extracted materials should
be 6 tonnes per capita rather than the current 8 tonnes. Furthermore,
it is not just about the biophysical limits to absorption
of the effects of human activities that matter, but also limits to the
quantities of remaining strategic non-renewable resources (such as oil
and metals) and limits to how far ecosystems such as fisheries, water
cycles, soils and atmospheres can be exploited and modified.

References

1. World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

1. World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

2. Escobar A. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the
Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

2. Escobar A. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the
Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.